5 ms·

Google's problem is that most of the work is shitty legacy maintenance. If you can get on one of their machine-learning or research projects and have a good man

Google's problem is that most of the work is shitty legacy maintenance. If you can get on one of their machine-learning or research projects and have a good manager, you'll have a fantastic experience (and I say this as a notorious Google detractor). Take the offer seriously but negotiate extremely hard on project allocation because it's really hard to transfer to a good project if you start in the wrong place, so your first project is the difference between an awesome Google career and shit. And most people get shit. Good luck! ETA: Google would be awesome if it adopted the Valve culture where employees are trusted to allocate their own time, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

dhconnelly 14y ago
Well, I was there for six months over the course of two internships in two different offices, and nearly everybody I met was excited about their project. I know you had a bad experience, but I think this is a little bit of projection. I would be extremely reluctant to, based on such a short time at the company, decide that most of the thousands of engineers are working on shit projects.
rjzzleep 14y ago
> ETA: Google would be awesome if it adopted the Valve culture where employees are trusted to allocate their own time, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I don't see how that's supposed to work. From what I understand it's too big and clunky. A lot of dpts don't even know others exist, some groups are just a product bought off other companies and kept in tact. The way I see it's too big and diverse to be able to have such a structure.
cletus 14y ago
Do not, under any circumstances, take this guy's advice or in fact listen to anything he says. Anyone who was an engineer during his brief tenure is well aware of just how much he self-destructed and how much he's living in a fantasy world. The only problem here is that to an uninformed observer some of what he says looks plausible. As for the OP's problem: a lot depends on your options, your experience, what you're hoping to achieve, what you'd like to work on, what office this would be in, etc. There are tons of variables. Speaking as a current Googler, it is a fantastic place to work but it's not suited to everyone. tl;dr it depends.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I don't have time to respond to this ad hominem smear. Yes, there was some blowback related to my attempt to save a failing product. I learned a lesson and moved on. I'm not anti-Google. I want the OP to have a great Google experience and to do that he needs to negotiate hard on project allocation.
  - sequoia 14y ago
    As a random HN user with no connection to Google who has seen what happens when you comment on stories about Google here (it's a shit storm), might I humbly suggest that you consider not commenting on stories about Google? It seems to always turn into The Michaelochurch Show when you do. Not saying your opinions aren't valid, but I think your contributions re: google are unfortunately not useful because they inevitably spawn arguments about your character. Take one for the team and sit out the Google discussions maybe? That way when you have a contribution about some other topic, people will see you as a person and not "that crazy ex googler whose credibility is highly suspect." :)
    - deleted 14y ago
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    - deleted 14y ago
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    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      I don't think he should sit out Google discussions. He had the experience he had. Others have the experiences they have. We're all capable of assessing his reports for ourselves. I might add we're also all capable of assessing the responses of Googlers to his reports for ourselves, and those responses don't always speak well of Google.
      - MaysonL 14y ago
        And we've almost all seen what's happened to Gmail, Google Reader, Google Labs and 20% time.
bonafidehan 14y ago
Since this comment is currently at the top, I feel I have to add that michaelochurch's overall Google experience was an extreme outlier, as is well known internally at the company.
- waqf 14y ago
  People who are currently at Google will obviously not be an unbiased sample of all people who have ever joined Google.
  - sAasdasfd 14y ago
    Certainly true. Speaking as a current Googler, I don't understand the motivation of all the current Googlers who are speaking anonymously here to defend Google. Google's a good place to work. Like any, it has its faults and is not the right place for everyone. Hopefully you'll make these important career decisions by, I don't know, talking to people you know and trust who do or have worked here, and not by taking the Internet ramblings of anonymous dorks at face value.
realgoogler 14y ago
"most of the work is shitty legacy maintenance" LOL no. Stop projecting.
dennisgorelik 14y ago
As Google customer I wish there were more strong professionals at Google who like legacy maintenance. Today I received email from Google AdSense about change in their system. The only important part of the change was not even mentioned in that email: AdSese lost my payment information (alongside with all other AdSense users I assume) so I have to re-setup payment information again. Strong team would be able to preserve customers' payment information during system upgrade, but it wasn't the case today.
- mdwrigh2 14y ago
  I would highly doubt that they dropped everyone's payment information. Think about how much money would be lost from people not willing to overcome the inertia and re-entering their payment info.
  - dennisgorelik 14y ago
    It could be that management hopes for that -- due to publishers' inertia AdSense will delay payments them. I wonder if that delay would improve GOOG Q3 revenue results. Edit: it seems I guessed incorrect (due to GAAP).
    - mdwrigh2 14y ago
      You report revenue and expenses during the quarter in which they were earned, not when they're paid. So a delay in payment wouldn't change their Q3 filings at all. Beyond this, Google makes a profit from having both sides continue to participate. The more ads they can show, the better. Hampering one side of this equation for temporary gains that only really improve how you look to Wall Street (not how you're actually performing) is silly, and seems completely counter to how Google typically works.
      - dennisgorelik 14y ago
        I agree that it does not make sense from long term business perspective. But then what's left? I know for sure that my own payment information is gone and it coincided with AdSense system upgrade. Can anyone with AdSense account share if their payment information is still set? But even if it's just my payment information lost - it's not a good sign about quality of engineering at AdSense.
raldi 14y ago
My experience at Google has been nothing like what you describe. There's a ton of interesting work being done, and from everything I've seen, a culture extremely supportive of internal transfers.
DannyBee 14y ago
Every time I see you write, i get the picture of a drunk guy in a bar walking around saying "lemmme tell you about the time i worked for google" in slurred speech to anyone who will listen.
- mvgoogler 14y ago
  Damnit - you're comment made me snarf coffee all over my laptop. :-)
vagrant 14y ago
I was hired at Google at nearly the same time as a certain famous ex-Googler. Both of us were given difficult intro jobs with legacy systems, the sort of projects that chew up engineers and spit them out. It's a chance to prove your mettle. One of us attacked the problem head on, taking on tasks that would normally be "below" us. In the end, the bad project taught him what he needed to know about Google engineering. He replaced the legacy system with modern infrastructure, which brought him public recognition from the senior VPs, new opportunities to work on interesting projects, and nomination for promotion. The other one of us decided that he was too good for his job. He very publicly whined about how it was below him and how the only way to get ahead at Google is to start out in one of the interesting jobs. Rather than work his way up through a meritocracy, he expected to be instantly recognized for his natural genius. He got poor performance ratings from his peers and manager, and eventually rage-quit after about six months. It was the classic Goofus and Gallant story.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  That's radically inaccurate but I don't have the time to set you right.
  - vagrant 14y ago
    Of course you don't. You are too busy writing the shiny new stuff.
  - jrockway 14y ago
    As the author of more centithreads than God himself, you don't have time to reply to a comment on the Internet? I'm kind of impressed with your restraint, actually.
offer_today 14y ago
I had seen your earlier comments and asked Googlers how hard they thought it was to change projects. They said they hadn't ever encountered another company that made it easier to change project than Google does, and wanted to know if you had encountered such a company.
- tazzy531 14y ago
  Just for some context. I started a couple months after this former Googler and our work backgrounds prior to Google are pretty similar. In that time, I started out on an underappreciated starter project, did a hackathon for Hangout, filed some patents for that work, did 20% work for an yet to be announced project, and now building out a completely new yet to be announced product. Google is a place that really allows you to find something that interests you and encourages you to do that. Internally, people are always looking for people to put in 20% work on their projects; so if you come across something that interests you, nobody is there to stop you. Personally, if I was only to work on one project for my entire tenure, I'd be bored out of my mind and be looking elsewhere for opportunities. At Google, I can feed by project-ADD within. One thing you learn at Google is that it really humbles you. You really are working with really intelligent people and you need to have some faith in your fellow coworker. Everyone has something to contribute and you can learn even more than you can teach/preach. Much of the issues with this former Googler is that he may have had some good/interesting ideas but he failed at garnering support. It doesn't help when he publicly on a global mailing list dismissed coworkers that have a significant amount of experience and real world accomplishments in the field that he was advocating.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    Much of the issues with this former Googler is that he may have had some good/interesting ideas but he failed at garnering support. I had widespread engineering support, actually. The problem was that (a) the people managing that product didn't understand the importance of quality in content, and (b) they were under obscene deadlines (which almost certainly wasn;'t their fault). What really kicked me in the shins was when an executive, pissed off that people on his team agreed with what I was saying being the right way to go, threatened to damage my Perf ratings. My manager promised to protect me (he promised to "peg" me to 3.3-3.4, which is decent) and didn't deliver. After that, I started looking for transfer opportunities, because I'd caught my manager in a few lies but that was a big one, and I just couldn't trust my manager after that. It turned out to be easier to get a job outside of the company, so I did.

dhconnelly 14y ago

Well, I was there for six months over the course of two internships in two different offices, and nearly everybody I met was excited about their project. I know you had a bad experience, but I think this is a little bit of projection. I would be extremely reluctant to, based on such a short time at the company, decide that most of the thousands of engineers are working on shit projects.

rjzzleep 14y ago

> ETA: Google would be awesome if it adopted the Valve culture where employees are trusted to allocate their own time, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I don't see how that's supposed to work. From what I understand it's too big and clunky. A lot of dpts don't even know others exist, some groups are just a product bought off other companies and kept in tact. The way I see it's too big and diverse to be able to have such a structure.

cletus 14y ago

Do not, under any circumstances, take this guy's advice or in fact listen to anything he says. Anyone who was an engineer during his brief tenure is well aware of just how much he self-destructed and how much he's living in a fantasy world. The only problem here is that to an uninformed observer some of what he says looks plausible. As for the OP's problem: a lot depends on your options, your experience, what you're hoping to achieve, what you'd like to work on, what office this would be in, etc. There are tons of variables. Speaking as a current Googler, it is a fantastic place to work but it's not suited to everyone. tl;dr it depends.

michaelochurch 14y ago
I don't have time to respond to this ad hominem smear. Yes, there was some blowback related to my attempt to save a failing product. I learned a lesson and moved on. I'm not anti-Google. I want the OP to have a great Google experience and to do that he needs to negotiate hard on project allocation.
- sequoia 14y ago
  As a random HN user with no connection to Google who has seen what happens when you comment on stories about Google here (it's a shit storm), might I humbly suggest that you consider not commenting on stories about Google? It seems to always turn into The Michaelochurch Show when you do. Not saying your opinions aren't valid, but I think your contributions re: google are unfortunately not useful because they inevitably spawn arguments about your character. Take one for the team and sit out the Google discussions maybe? That way when you have a contribution about some other topic, people will see you as a person and not "that crazy ex googler whose credibility is highly suspect." :)
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    I don't think he should sit out Google discussions. He had the experience he had. Others have the experiences they have. We're all capable of assessing his reports for ourselves. I might add we're also all capable of assessing the responses of Googlers to his reports for ourselves, and those responses don't always speak well of Google.
    - MaysonL 14y ago
      And we've almost all seen what's happened to Gmail, Google Reader, Google Labs and 20% time.

bonafidehan 14y ago

Since this comment is currently at the top, I feel I have to add that michaelochurch's overall Google experience was an extreme outlier, as is well known internally at the company.

waqf 14y ago
People who are currently at Google will obviously not be an unbiased sample of all people who have ever joined Google.
- sAasdasfd 14y ago
  Certainly true. Speaking as a current Googler, I don't understand the motivation of all the current Googlers who are speaking anonymously here to defend Google. Google's a good place to work. Like any, it has its faults and is not the right place for everyone. Hopefully you'll make these important career decisions by, I don't know, talking to people you know and trust who do or have worked here, and not by taking the Internet ramblings of anonymous dorks at face value.

realgoogler 14y ago

"most of the work is shitty legacy maintenance" LOL no. Stop projecting.

dennisgorelik 14y ago

As Google customer I wish there were more strong professionals at Google who like legacy maintenance. Today I received email from Google AdSense about change in their system. The only important part of the change was not even mentioned in that email: AdSese lost my payment information (alongside with all other AdSense users I assume) so I have to re-setup payment information again. Strong team would be able to preserve customers' payment information during system upgrade, but it wasn't the case today.

mdwrigh2 14y ago
I would highly doubt that they dropped everyone's payment information. Think about how much money would be lost from people not willing to overcome the inertia and re-entering their payment info.
- dennisgorelik 14y ago
  It could be that management hopes for that -- due to publishers' inertia AdSense will delay payments them. I wonder if that delay would improve GOOG Q3 revenue results. Edit: it seems I guessed incorrect (due to GAAP).
  - mdwrigh2 14y ago
    You report revenue and expenses during the quarter in which they were earned, not when they're paid. So a delay in payment wouldn't change their Q3 filings at all. Beyond this, Google makes a profit from having both sides continue to participate. The more ads they can show, the better. Hampering one side of this equation for temporary gains that only really improve how you look to Wall Street (not how you're actually performing) is silly, and seems completely counter to how Google typically works.
    - dennisgorelik 14y ago
      I agree that it does not make sense from long term business perspective. But then what's left? I know for sure that my own payment information is gone and it coincided with AdSense system upgrade. Can anyone with AdSense account share if their payment information is still set? But even if it's just my payment information lost - it's not a good sign about quality of engineering at AdSense.

raldi 14y ago

My experience at Google has been nothing like what you describe. There's a ton of interesting work being done, and from everything I've seen, a culture extremely supportive of internal transfers.

DannyBee 14y ago

Every time I see you write, i get the picture of a drunk guy in a bar walking around saying "lemmme tell you about the time i worked for google" in slurred speech to anyone who will listen.

mvgoogler 14y ago
Damnit - you're comment made me snarf coffee all over my laptop. :-)

vagrant 14y ago

I was hired at Google at nearly the same time as a certain famous ex-Googler. Both of us were given difficult intro jobs with legacy systems, the sort of projects that chew up engineers and spit them out. It's a chance to prove your mettle. One of us attacked the problem head on, taking on tasks that would normally be "below" us. In the end, the bad project taught him what he needed to know about Google engineering. He replaced the legacy system with modern infrastructure, which brought him public recognition from the senior VPs, new opportunities to work on interesting projects, and nomination for promotion. The other one of us decided that he was too good for his job. He very publicly whined about how it was below him and how the only way to get ahead at Google is to start out in one of the interesting jobs. Rather than work his way up through a meritocracy, he expected to be instantly recognized for his natural genius. He got poor performance ratings from his peers and manager, and eventually rage-quit after about six months. It was the classic Goofus and Gallant story.

michaelochurch 14y ago
That's radically inaccurate but I don't have the time to set you right.
- vagrant 14y ago
  Of course you don't. You are too busy writing the shiny new stuff.
- jrockway 14y ago
  As the author of more centithreads than God himself, you don't have time to reply to a comment on the Internet? I'm kind of impressed with your restraint, actually.

offer_today 14y ago

I had seen your earlier comments and asked Googlers how hard they thought it was to change projects. They said they hadn't ever encountered another company that made it easier to change project than Google does, and wanted to know if you had encountered such a company.

tazzy531 14y ago
Just for some context. I started a couple months after this former Googler and our work backgrounds prior to Google are pretty similar. In that time, I started out on an underappreciated starter project, did a hackathon for Hangout, filed some patents for that work, did 20% work for an yet to be announced project, and now building out a completely new yet to be announced product. Google is a place that really allows you to find something that interests you and encourages you to do that. Internally, people are always looking for people to put in 20% work on their projects; so if you come across something that interests you, nobody is there to stop you. Personally, if I was only to work on one project for my entire tenure, I'd be bored out of my mind and be looking elsewhere for opportunities. At Google, I can feed by project-ADD within. One thing you learn at Google is that it really humbles you. You really are working with really intelligent people and you need to have some faith in your fellow coworker. Everyone has something to contribute and you can learn even more than you can teach/preach. Much of the issues with this former Googler is that he may have had some good/interesting ideas but he failed at garnering support. It doesn't help when he publicly on a global mailing list dismissed coworkers that have a significant amount of experience and real world accomplishments in the field that he was advocating.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  Much of the issues with this former Googler is that he may have had some good/interesting ideas but he failed at garnering support. I had widespread engineering support, actually. The problem was that (a) the people managing that product didn't understand the importance of quality in content, and (b) they were under obscene deadlines (which almost certainly wasn;'t their fault). What really kicked me in the shins was when an executive, pissed off that people on his team agreed with what I was saying being the right way to go, threatened to damage my Perf ratings. My manager promised to protect me (he promised to "peg" me to 3.3-3.4, which is decent) and didn't deliver. After that, I started looking for transfer opportunities, because I'd caught my manager in a few lies but that was a big one, and I just couldn't trust my manager after that. It turned out to be easier to get a job outside of the company, so I did.